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by steamrolled
374 days ago
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> Gary Marcus isn't about "getting real", it's making a name for himself as a contrarian to the popular AI narrative. That's an odd standard. Not wanting to be wrong is a universal human instinct. By that logic, every person who ever took any position on LLMs is automatically untrustworthy. After all, they made a name for themselves by being pro- or con-. Or maybe a centrist - that's a position too. Either he makes good points or he doesn't. Unless he has a track record of distorting facts, his ideological leanings should be irrelevant. |
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For example he continusly calls out AGI hype for what it is, and also showcases dangers of naive use of LLMs (eg. lawyers copy-pasting hallucinated cases into their documents, etc). For this, he has plenty of material!
He also makes some very bad points and worse inferences: that LLMs as a technology are useless because they can't lead to AGI, that hallucation makes LLMs useless (but then he contradicts himself in another article conceding they "may have some use"), that because they can't follow an algorithm they're useless, etc, that scaling laws are over therefore LLMs won't advance (he's been making that for a couple of years), that AI bubble will collapse in a few months (also a few years of that), etc.
Read any of his article (I've read too many, sadly) and you'll never come to the conclusion that LLMs might be a useful technology, or be "a good thing" even in some limited way. This just doesn't fit with reality I can observe with my own eyes.
To me, this shows he's incredibly biased. That's okay if he wants to be a pundit - I couldn't blame Gruber for being biased about Apple! But Marcus presents himself as the authority on AI, a scientist, showing a real and unbiased view on the field. In fact, he's as full of hype as Sam Altman is, just in another direction.
Imagine he was talking about aviation, not AI. 787 dreamliner crashes? "I've been saying for 10 years that airplanes are unsafe, they can fall from the sky!" Boeing the company does stupid shit? "Blown door shows why airplane makers can't be trusted" Airline goes bankrupt? "Air travel winter is here"
I've spoken to too many intelligent people who read Marcus, take him at his words and have incredibly warped views on the actual potential and dangers of AI (and send me links to his latest piece with "so this sounds pretty damning, what's your take?"). He does real damage.
Compare him with Simon Willison, who also writes about AI a lot, and is vocal about its shortcomings and dangers. Reading Simon, I never get the feeling I'm being sold on a story (either positive or negative), but that I learned something.
Perhaps a Marcus is inevitable as a symptom of the Internet's immune system to the huge amount of AI hype and bullshit being thrown around. Perhaps Gary is just fed up with everything and comes out guns blazing, science be damned. I don't know.
But in my mind, he's as much BSer as the AGI singularity hypers.